Senior Labour MP accuses BBC of 'whitewash' over coverage of BNP rise to power

BBC bosses are under fire for going soft on the far right British National Party.

News chiefs at the corporation were accused of a ‘whitewash’ for delaying an investigation into the extremist views of the BNP until after the European elections next month. The poll on June 4th could see the neo-fascist group gain British seats in the Brussels Parliament for the first time.

Campaigners and MPs said that politically correct liberals at the BBC are ‘being played like fools’ for treating the BNP like ‘any other political party’. The party’s leader Nick Griffin has already been offered a one to one chat with the BBC interviewer Andrew Marr if his party acquires its first MEP.

The anti-fascist campaign group Searchlight called for an explanation of the BBC’s decision to postpone the broadcast of an investigation into a senior British National Party activist with links to the South African security services. The shelved investigation, being produced by BBC Wales, features Arthur Kemp, the South African head of BNP election distribution, who was arrested following the murder of anti-apartheid activist Chris Hani, in 1993.

Although subsequently released, Kemp admitted producing a list of names of prominent ANC activists that was found at the home of one of Hani’s killers.

Searchlight is also angry that a Newsnight report titled ‘the rising power of the BNP’ broadcast last week concluded: ‘It looks like a more moderate BNP courting voters this spring.’ The programme failed to mention that Clive Jefferson one of the BNP activists it interviewed was arrested two years ago for an alleged public order offence, following a complaint from a member of the public that he had been threatening and abusive whilst distributing BNP literature.

A second BNP figure featured in the report, Martin Wingfield, was arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned in 1985 under the Race Relations Act, following distribution of racist literature. His criminal record was not mentioned either and BNP Deputy Leader Simon Darby advised his members to watch the broadcast, claiming it was, ‘not a bad piece overall’.

Senior Labour MP Jon Cruddas has written to Helen Boaden, the director of BBC News to call for a change of tack, after it also emerged that BNP spokesman have also been interviewed by a BBC camera crew for a second Newsnight piece on ‘British Jobs For British Workers’, a phrase used by Gordon Brown but now appropriated as the BNP’s election slogan.

He wrote: ‘It seems to me that there is total confusion within the BBC regarding editorial policy towards the British National Party. Membership of the BNP is proscribed in a number of public sector organisations, such as the Police and the Prison Service. It is not, ‘just another political party’.

‘There is no attempt to scrutinise the BNP on their extremist policy platform, their membership, their links to other extremist organisations, or their extremist philosophy.’

Mr Cruddas said: ‘Their activists are featured, but not challenged. Issues favourable to their agenda are analysed on national news and current affairs outlets. Invitations are extended to their spokesman indicating they are to be treated as if they are a mainstream political party. And programmes which expose their extremist and racist agenda are shelved. It is imperative that common sense and clarity are brought to the Corporation’s editorial policy towards this neo-Fascist organisation.’

A Searchlight spokesman added: ‘The BBC are being played like fools by the BNP. The Newsnight broadcast was a whitewash, and now they’re axing programmes because of pressure from Nick Griffin and his thugs.

'If the BBC want to cover the BNP that’s fine, but they have to challenge them and properly expose their agenda of prejudice and hate.’

Daily Mail

There's one (BNP website idiot) born every minute

Would you Adam and Eve it?

Aunty Beeb's traditional April Fool was a real cracker. They reckoned a camera crew had discovered a colony of flying penguins in the South Atlantic, claiming that the penguins flew thousands of miles to find winter sun in the Amazonian rain forest.

Not only that, but they had video of these astounding birds!

Clever stuff, but anybody watching could see that the video of "flying penguins" was CGI, and anybody with any nous would have noted the date - April 1st.

But not Chris Brown of the BNP's website (the one which is currently using other sites' bandwidth by linking directly to images hosted on them - they've been informed).

Brown seems to have believed the hoax and posted news of the "flying penguins" up on the BNP website, but the racists (most of them - there were exceptions!) rushed to put him right, as only BNP members could:

"Yeh thats the BBCs april fools. When I first saw it I thought it was flying illegal immigrants going back home."

"Mmmmm Sounds about as believable as a BBC report on a racist issue. Were they asian penguins? or Muslim penguins?"

"Are we sure this is not an April fool?"

"Maybe I am missing something here but this is not new. This phenomena has been known for a very long time."

"This is just another presentation of an already known fact given a new spin in an attempt to bolster the baseless theory of evolution in order to undermine the orthodox Biblical (Christian) belief structure of our society and culture. Although it is truly wonderous, as all of nature is a marvel to behold I would have expected you even as a secular party to have seen through this clever subterfuge."

"It has to be an April Fools joke from the BBC. You can do wonders with Computer Graphics. Come on its presented by an ex-monty python star. Also their wings shown are not big enough to create the required lift, and propulsion to take them to the amazon."

"I took a pic of a Pigasus, (a winged pig) flying over a mosque but I can’t seem to download it."

Still, it diverted attention a little from BNP GLA candidate Nick Eriksen's musings on the triviality of rape and the need to strike women regularly (see article below).

Oh - hang about! After BNP deputy leader Simon Darby claimed that reporting of Eriksen's comments was a "smear" against the BNP, it seems the BNP has dropped Eriksen from its GLA list and may be about to expel him from the party to try to salvage the situation.

Some hope.

The BNP - the biggest April Fool joke of them all!

BBC in race row after BNP leader blames Muslims for Britain's drug problems

The BBC was last night dragged into a race row after it broadcast claims by the British National Party blaming Muslim immigrants for the country's hard drugs problems.

The comments were made during a debate on multiculturalism on BBC2's Newsnight (click to see the programme), which examined the results of a survey for the channel's White season - a series of documentaries on what it means to be white and working class in Britain today.

It found that white working class are far more pessimistic about Britain's future than their middle-class counterparts, while more than half said no one represented their views and that their quality of life had got worse over the past decade.

When informed the poll showed that white working class Britons were more concerned about drug and drink culture than immigration, the BNP leader Nick Griffin responded with an attack on Pakistani immigrants. He said: "You can't possibly separate the hard drugs trade from the question of Islam and particularly Pakistani immigration. Any working class area of Britain - in a multiracial area - the hard drugs problem is related to Islam and Pakistan."

Interviewer Kirsty Wark responded: "I think there's a number of people that would dispute that."

Griffin went on to reiterate that mixing cultures is not a good thing, saying: "I would say that people who want to reduce the world to a mono-culture coffee-coloured world, they are the ones who hate."

A panellist on the show immediately criticised the decision to show the clip, branding the decision 'pathetic'. Talk show host and columnist Jon Gaunt last night said: "Putting on somebody like that knuckle-dragger. I don't really understand the point. He doesn't represent me and doesn't represent most working class people. He's not a working class guy himself, and the foul things he was coming out with there about the drugs and Islam and the rest if it, and the nonsense about coffee culture just makes me want to puke."

He added: "The BBC probably put him on to make out again that all white working class people are fascists. I'm highly suspicious. Why did you interview Nick Griffin on this debate? It's pathetic."

The BBC today issued a statement which defended its choice of Nick Griffin as a participant in the debate.

It said: "The views expressed were his as leader of the BNP and he was robustly questioned and challenged on his comments throughout the interview. Newsnight does not ban any group from taking part in debate as long as they are operating within the law. The programme has a reputation for tough and challenging interviews and within the context of the debate it was relevant to hear from the leader of the BNP. He was one of a number of people debating the issues on the programme."

Daily Mail